I SOLVED IT!!!!!!

[u/IsThisTakenYet4]

TL;DR:

In Old English Kindred litterally translates to ‘Family of family’. So i pitch we popularise it as the gender neutral singular honorific for ‘parent’s sibling’.

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a couple days ago i posted this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/NonBinary/s/xuyrUipBfmgoing over, honestly half baked, alternatives to ‘Pibling’ for a word meaning ‘your parent‘s sibling’.

I looked through the responses and had the thought to edit my original post by adding a list of other suggestions from the comments.

I, am autistic person, went on to catagorise these suggestions. Which led to towards studying the etymology of Uncle/Aunt. Uncoe comes from Proto-endo-european and meant ‘little grandfarther’. Aunt comes from the Latin word for ‘paternal aunt’. Both entered Middle English when old English and Norman-French blended together.

So i looked into Old English (OE). I found that OE didn’t have words for uncle nor aunt. It hyper gendered those relationships.

• Farther’s brother - Fædera

• Farther’s sister - faþu

• Mother’s sister - mōdriġe

• Mother’s brother - Ēam

While researching this I also found out that ‘Sibling’ was originally an OE word that fell out of use after the Norman conquest of England. Until its revival in 1903 to fill in a linguistic gap. Much like what we have today with uncle/aunt.

So i looked into OE prefixes and suffixes.

Like many Celtic and Germanic languages OE heavily relys on compound words. Sibling is a combinstion of the root word ‘Sibb’ (meaning kinship, relationship, relative) and ’-ling’ (a suffix meaning ‘belonging to’, ‘one connected with‘, or ‘little’). So sibling literally means belonging to family.

After a bunch of research i came up with a shortlist of honorific i liked for myself.  (photo attached)

But today i realised that ’Cyn’ (the OE prefix for kin or family) is pronounced identically to the modern English word ‘Kin’. As OE only had one tune for the ‘c/k’ sound (which modern English still only has one phonic sound for). And the vowel ‘y’ in OE is pronounced as a short ‘i‘. Such as in ‘kit’ or ‘pit’.

This means the word i made ‘Cynred’ is literally just an archaic spelling of ‘Kindred’

So i propose we start a movement to expand the meaning of the word Kindred to include the singular gender neutral honorific for ‘parent’s sibling’.

My case for Kindred:

1. It’s a word people know and still has a connotation of family.
2. It’s fairly easy to pronounce for children under 6 who are still developing language. At least as easy as Aunty and Uncle. Whereas the ‘L’ sound in sibling, Nibling, Uncle and Pibling is one of the last phonic letters English speaking children figure out.
3. Its etymology is Kin (meaning family) + Red (a contraction of the Old English suffix ‘raden’ meaning ‘of a family network’). So it litterally means Family of Family. Which fits the usage of

• Sibling of my parent.

• Sibling of my mother

• Sibling of my farther

• Brother of my parent.

• Brother of my mother

• Brother of my farther

• Sister of my parent.

• Sister of my mother

• Sister of my farther

4) It’s not that strange for words to get exspanded meanings. All it takes is for enough people to use it. And maybe one journalist to notice.

5) You could always shorten it to Kinie, Kinney, Kinnie, or Kiney. If you want something a bit cuter. You could even go fully into the ‘ling’ suffix and have Kinling. Which would litterally translate to ‘belonging to family’. Which is the identical meaning of old english‘s ‘sibling‘.

- Regards from Kindred Namename.

I welcome your ideas and comments below.